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On July 20, U.S. government officials seized the website KickAssTorrents (KAT) and arrested the alleged founder of the site, Artem Vaulin. The site facilitated pirated seeding and downloading of copyrighted material through various BitTorrent platforms.

KickAssTorrents Seized, Probably Won’t Come Back

The KAT website was created in 2009 and was one of the most popular torrenting domains similar to the infamous PirateBay. U.S. authorities had help from Homeland Security, Facebook, Linkedin, and the Bitcoin exchange Coinbase with taking down the torrent website.

https://news.bitcoin.com/coinbase-helps-fbi-shut-kickasstorrents/

Well,that is some news!The Coinbase part.Don't understand why would they do that ? Shit has nothing to do with bitcoins.On a side note,one torrent site shutting down doesn't matter.10 new torrent sites will be up in no time.
Coinbase = Centralized Bank for bitcoins.

That couldn't be more true.

The Coinbase part does make sense; chances are there was more to it and Coinbase had to comply with a law or subpoena that the FBI made them aware of, and being a business and having an account which more than likely had some proceeds of crime in it (as well as being in violation of their ToS) they wanted to make a good impression with the FBI and be as helpful as they could so they could stay in business.

Yeah if you are running a legitimate business, you probably want to comply when the FBI hits you with a subpoena!
It will be interesting to see if more details come out about this.
What did KAT have to do with Bitcoin? Were they taking some payments or making some payments in BTC?

To be fair, Facebook and Apple also contributed to this investigation as well.

https://www.google.com/amp/thenextweb.com/insider/2016/07/21/kickasstorrents-apple-id-facebook-lulz/%3famp=1?client=ms-android-att-us#


His email was discovered when authorities sent Facebook a warrant for information having to do with the site’s page. From there, the US Government turned to Apple.

Vaulin used the same @me.com email to make an iTunes purchase, which records your IP address for every transaction. His IP addresses were then tied to his bitcoin account.

Which means coinbase records IP per session, and shares this data when requested.

Bitcoin exchanges should not be located in the United States of Bilderberg.

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It blows my mind how people like this guy and Ulbricht have the intelligence and vision to set up such sites, yet screw up so royally in the process. Why the hell would this guy register the domain and use a Coinbase account in his own name? These guys should be so paranoid to even go take a shit never mind do all their operations from their own home without making sure they've got every base secured with numerous layers of security nevermind not even using a proxy to log into sites connected to you and using your real name in the process. Bafflles me.


Did you even read the article? The bitcoins he was donated to went to an account registered in his own name. The bitcoin link was just another piece of evidence to connect him to the crime. One more nail in the coffin.


Coinbase is an exchange, one that has to comply with KYC and AML laws and will give up your details when requested to so. Just goes to show bitcoin is only as anonymous as you make it.

The hardest part of running any illegal operation is going to be converting the BTC into another form of payment.
At some point you are going to have to link with a bank account or some other personal information if you want to convert those coins into another currency.
Most people are going to be too greedy to have it set up in someone elses name, and that's where they are going to get caught.

Damn this website was huge and loved by a lot of people. Coinbase will only bring even more haters by doing this. Im broke so I got a lot of software I needed to do stuff thanks to KAT website. There will be mirrors anyway... the battle never ends.

It's safe to say that many of us used torrents in our lives but this guy was apparently floating on cash and while I do agree that many copyright rights and laws are stuck in another century I don't really feel good knowing someone is directly profiting from it.

It's like if I download a movie and watch, ok...I'm just poor as fuck, next time I will go to the cinemas or get netflix whatever, it comes back, p2p means someone "invited" me if you will. However another different thing would be for me to download the movie and make a profit out of it...I don't think that's really fair.

Coinbase have to comply with the law, so they share the ID of their customers with the authorities whenever Coinbase get a request to do so. When you signing up at Coinbase and providng ID verification it is clear you approve this, what other reason would the ID verification be for ? So no surprice at all.

I was thinking before that coinbase also take their part to get the kickasstorrent arrested , and there was a thought on my mind that maybe coinbase is already controlled by the FBI since before or they are just impressing the FBI and the government . What the heck also it was also the owners fault I guess because he accessing those services using the same IP Address .

This^

If you're going to be investigated by the most resourceful law enforcement agency in the world, you better be Ed Snowden paranoid level.

There is a new version of the kick ass torrent around, don't know if it is trustable, don't know if it is up to date.

It is like when piratebay was down, didn't took longer until they are back, by the hands of the funders or of someone else.

Address is: https://kickasstorrentsan.com/

Latest torrents from 7 days ago.

VirusTotal comes clean.

Whether you're of the opinion he should have been more careful or what he did was bad it doesn't matter. It's not the end of torrents is it? 

I tried those sites but almost all torrents are down.. We know almost all virus is in torrents so beware if you have torrent in your computer your coins are not safe.. there is a progrma automated download in torrent and autoinstall that can disable selfdefence of antivirus and remove anti virus in your pc..

All their efforts are kinda useless , I mean who fight something that use Peer to peer ? It's just a matter of time till someone gets another website like that .

This does not come to us as a surprise... They have been under KYC/AML regulations for a while now, and they cannot operate legally without it. This just makes me believe stronger in the fact that we

should not trust any exchange or Bitcoin service that needs to adhere to these regulations. Not because you want to do something illegal, but because IP and personal information are being farmed and

passed onto government organizations. It's a huge centralized database of all your personal Bitcoin transactions.  ::)

Exactly. Of they want to run legitimate business they have to cooperate with governemt. They are also obliged to follow some AML rules. Whether users like it or not for them this is the only way to stay at the market. Although with such policies Bitcoin usersw do.losew their anonimity.

And already there are like a million mirrors available. Just like when it happened to the pirate bay.
I will be closing my coinbase account though, kat was my favourite site to download

In the deep web was a nice saying regarding persons with vision and intelligence like this guy but  screw up in the process and they thought they had every thing under control. When Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road was captured I remember this sentence which I will never forget in the deep web : "Words cannot describe how stupid he was" as he too as far as I remember had the server in North Carolina in USA.
Now I am impressed more and this other guy owner of kickass torrents which uses a coinbase account deserves even more the above sentence. Its a good thing though that this is not the end of torrents as we all need them in our lifes, well most of us do for sure.

And it will not be but losing a top torrent site that easily should make the other owners be careful with whom to deal with and when they have to hide their identities...
Seriously he made a huge mistake  :-\

I'm not sure how they helped to close it but using Coinbase as a wallet wasn't a good move in the first place.
Coinbase don't even give you the control over your private keys in the first , without mentioning that it's an online wallet and it can get hacked

kickass definitely shouldn't be using a online wallet.... running a business like that in a company with his identification isnt a smart thing to do.

Coinbase is basically a nosy parker in every matter.
I think one of their users got involved in such activities and so they tried to clean their hands off that way.

Well, now you can basically forget about torrent and start a new way of watching movies: http://www.strem.io
I basically visit torrent for movies only. So this is my suggestion as an alternative.

It wasn't an smart decision to store its bitcoins on an a web wallet like coinbase that could block its money. If they used any other wallet where they had the private key no one could block its bitcoins.

Why Kickasstorrent admin was using coinbase wallet.Coinbase wallet isnt popular anymore because they are now new sites like exchangers where you can save coins and trade with many other cryptocurrencies.

I guess this shines more of a good light upon the Bitcoin world but whether this was a good choice or not for Coinbase~

I think Coinbase has always catered to what the government has required from them since the inception of their company. Corporate Bitcoin doesn't uphold any tenets of the Bitcoin community and will share data of its customers upon request by the government so this isn't a big surprise that Coinbase 'ratted' him out to the feds. How could it be otherwise when the government could shut down Coinbase within the snap of a finger?

I feel pretty bad for this guy, but it's shocking how careless he was...

Of course they track your ip. Everytime you try and log in from another location, if your behind a vpn even, they ask you to verify it is you via your choice of verification when you signed up for an account. they recognize that your not logging in from regular location by ip address.

The alleged owner of KAT was using bitcoins and coinbase wallet. In some article, it was said that he did 42 transactions with it and if I remember correctly, he was buying songs on iTunes or some place.
It's ironic, isn't it? He owns a piracy site, yet choose to pay for songs, and when he did that, he wasn't even hiding his IP. It felt like he was trying to get himself arrested at all.